Facebook Releases the First Demographic Study of Its Users

Facebook is now at 350 million users worldwide and 100 million in just the US. At this size, demographic data becomes a pretty accurate substitute for data of the population on the whole. The results may still be a little skewed as several categories of people would be under-represented, but the discrepancies are getting smaller, as the results of a study undertaken by Facebook's Data team seem to indicate. The team went out to determine how Facebook's user base related to the general Internet population in the US when it comes to the representation of minorities. The study found that, even though there are still differences, the two data sets are becoming a lot more similar.

“[T]he Facebook Data team recently sought to answer the question, "How diverse are the ethnic backgrounds of the people using Facebook?," the study, published in Facebook blog post, read.

Facebook doesn't ask for a user's race or ethnicity when filling out the profile information, so the researchers had to use an alternate, indirect method of determining the users' ethnic background.

“Comparing people's surnames on Facebook with data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, we are able to estimate the racial breakdown of Facebook users over the history of the site,” the study explained

The study showed that the percentage of minority users had changed rather dramatically over time, and that as Facebook grew, the numbers got closer to the ones reported for all Internet users in the country.

“We discovered that Facebook has always been diverse and that the diversity has increased significantly over the past year to the point where U.S. Facebook users nearly mirror the diversity of the overall population of the country,” Facebook details the methodology used for the study and how it accounted for several potential sources of errors in the post.

The study showed that when Facebook started out, the Asian were much more likely to use it and made up 8 percent of the social network's user base almost double the percentage of the overall Internet population. At the same time, Blacks and especially Hispanics were much more under-represented. This changed significantly over time and now the percentages are close to the general ones.